1. Statement of the Problem
Corporations frequently encounter situations where a meeting between geographically separated parties would be appropriate, but the expenses associated with physical travel are prohibitive to that meeting taking place. In this situation, teleconferencing provides a convenient, low-cost solution by allowing individuals from various geographic locations to have a meeting over the telephone. Teleconferencing is also used within companies where parties to a meeting would not necessarily have to travel, but where meeting size exceeds available meeting space, or where gathering all meeting participants in one place is deemed inefficient. Private parties can also make use of teleconferencing for communicating simultaneously with multiple friends or family members over the phone.
In the past, teleconferencing was practiced from within a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) by manually dialing out to connect each participant to the others, with each participant placed on hold until all were connected to the conference originator. The disadvantages of this technique are many, with the most important being the continuing degradation in audio quality as each attendee is added, which often becomes unacceptable beyond three attendees. Additionally, this teleconferencing method is inconvenient and time-consuming.
Successor technology to PBX teleconferencing utilized conferencing bridge systems which used signal processing techniques to improve audio quality by controlling which talkers were summed together and provided to conference attendees as audio output of the bridge system. The primary disadvantage of this system is that the bridge system encompasses a limited number of voice channel resources, or ports, whose utilization must be manually monitored, scheduled, and controlled by an operator. This limitation requires users to schedule conferences in advance by specifying the time, duration, and number of ports required for the conference. What is needed is an automatic conferencing system or service that connects conferees together in teleconferences without a need for prior reservation or operator interaction.
Prior art conferencing bridge systems require that all system components be physically co-located to allow for operator control and system maintenance. This prevents the system from taking advantage of such flexibility and cost-saving techniques as least-cost routing and geographic load management. What is needed is the ability to locate conferencing hardware, specifically bridge resources, across a wide area geographically and still retain overall system control within a central location. In this system, conferences could occur physically on whatever hardware was determined to be the best choice from load-control and routing cost considerations, and the particular bridge selected for a conference would be unimportant and transparent to both conferees and operators.
Current conferencing systems support a limited selection of control interfaces available to conferees, most supporting Dual-Tone Multifrequency (DTMF) and operator controls only. A need exists for a system or service that allows the flexibility of a variety of control interfaces, including DTMF, operator, World Wide Web (WWW), and E-mail. Furthermore, all of the available interfaces should provide status information that is updated automatically whenever a status change takes place as a result of a command entered via one of the interfaces.
Present conferencing bridge systems are limited to supporting a maximum of a few hundred conferencing ports within a single system, which leads to high customer cost when use load of the system becomes high enough to warrant the addition of additional conferencing ports. This typically requires the purchase of an entire new bridge system. What is needed is a system that can be scaled in small port capacity increments from a few hundred up to many thousands of ports, without the need for an entire system purchase at each scaling point.
Prior art conferencing methods are highly prone to faults due to failed or partially-incapacitated hardware resources. For example, a hardware failure in a bridge will likely result in the need for manual intervention by conferencing operators to ensure that new conferences are not started on that bridge. Conferences in progress on that bridge may also be affected by being prematurely terminated. This can also happen upon a failure of central controlling software. What is needed is a system that can dynamically and automatically route new conferences away from failed hardware resources, as well as allow conferences in progress to continue despite a failure within the control system.
The following patents minimize the use of an operator in setting up a conference call. U.S. Pat. No. 5,559,876 to Alperovich provides a conferencing feature wherein an initiating subscriber creates a list of directory numbers for participants in a memory along with a conferencing code. The initiating subscriber must actually enter in the directory number of each participant for storage in the memory. To establish a conference call, the initiating subscriber enters the conference code. Conferencing circuitry detects the conferencing code and automatically conferences together participants associated with the directory numbers in memory. The '876 patent requires the initiating subscriber to enter the names and numbers of participants in advance of the conference call.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,408,518 issued to Yunoki provides a teleconference sponsor with the ability to reserve a teleconference in advance. The teleconference sponsor inputs data on the date and time of the teleconference run and data on the names of all teleconference participants. The '518 system registers the teleconference and then notifies the teleconference participants, in advance of the teleconference, by means such as a recorded message setting forth the date and time of the teleconference. Hence, the '518 patent requires reservation of a teleconference by the subscriber and then a separate process for notifying the teleconference participants prior to the time for the teleconference. The '518 system then calls up the respective teleconference participants registered in the database.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,483,588 issued to Eaton, et al., like the '518 and '876 patents set forth above, minimizes the need for a human operator to perform teleconferencing tasks. A user dials a "profile access" number, which permits the user to schedule a conference, select a conference to attend, manage recorded voice segments, and perform basic administrative functions such as changing their password. After the user has entered a correct profile and password access, the user can schedule a conference. If the user wishes to schedule a conference call in the future, the user enters the date, time, length and number of attendees. The system determines whether or not sufficient resources are available at that date and time with that length and number of attendees to schedule the call. If not enough resources are available, the user is asked to reschedule the conference call. Otherwise, the system prompts the caller for the conference call name and the agenda for the conference call. The system provides an ID number. If the user-wants an immediate conference, the system performs the same steps to determine availability of resources. Attendees to the conference can then call in and input the ID. If the ID is proper, the attendee is added to the conference call.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,559,875 issued to Bieselin, et al. sets forth a method and apparatus for recording and retrieval of audio conferences. The audio portion of the conference is recorded and digitized and placed in blocks of a determined size. These blocks are then stored on a computer storage medium so that they can be located and played back later.
None of the above patents solve the needs set forth above.
2. Solution to the Problem
The present invention solves the above problems by providing a novel system and method in the way that conferencing bridge resources are managed and dynamically allocated to process conference calls using scalable bridge(s) with real time resources.